Looking around Peştera Cu Oase: The beginnings of Upper Paleolithic in Romania Mircea Anghelinu a, * , Loredana Nit ¸  a a , Valéry Sitlivy b , Thorsten Uthmeier c , Ion B  altean d a Department of History and Letters, Faculty of Humanities, Valahia University of Târgovişte, Str. Lt. Stancu Ion, 34e35, 130115 Târgovişte, Romania b Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Cologne, Weyertal 125, 50923 Köln, Germany c Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Erlangen, Kochstraße 4/18, 91054 Erlangen, Germany d Heritage Advice S.R.L., Str. Nicolae Titulescu,1, 280/B/63, 510096 Alba Iulia, Romania article info Article history: Available online xxx abstract In contrast to the widely acknowledged anthropological finds in Oase Cave and to the key geographical position of Romanian territory for the assumed dispersion of Anatomically Modern Humans in Europe, the archaeological information regarding the emergence of the Upper Paleolithic in Romania remains poorly known to a broader scientific community. The prolonged theoretical and methodological isolation of the Romanian Paleolithic research has particularly contributed to keeping the regional archaeology out of the mainstream debates regarding the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe. It has also encouraged the widely held belief of most Romanian archaeologists in the gradual emergence of the Upper Paleolithic, initiated from the local Mousterian. The present paper puts forward a brief examination of the Romanian archaeological record allegedly belonging to the main cultural actors involved in the transition to the Upper Paleolithic across Europe: the Late Mousterian, the so-called “transitional” industries, and the Aurignacian technocomplex. Doubtful stratigraphical data and radiocarbon sampling feed skepticism regarding the supposed Late Mousterian occurrences in the Southern Carpathian caves. The “transitional” industries ask for a similar criticism, as they either display stratigraphical mixing (e.g. the Mitoc-Valea Izvorului), or simply do not belong to the Early Upper Paleolithic chronological framework (e.g. the Ripiceni-Izvor “Aurignacian”). The local origin, the wide dispersal, and the surprisingly young chronology of the Aurignacian tech- nocomplex in Romania are equally challenged. With the exception of the yet undated occurrences in Banat (Southwestern Romania), all the convincingly documented Aurignacian contexts belong to the generally accepted European chronological framework and show no particular connection to the local Mousterian. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The recent finding from the Oase Cave (Southwestern Romania) of the oldest European remains of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) (c. 35 ka uncalBP, Trinkaus et al., 2003, 2005), coupled with the confirmation of a quite early age for some other AMH speci- mens (Cioclovina e 29 ka uncalBP; Muierii e 30 ka uncalBP, Mlade c e 31 ka uncalBP) (Churchill and Smith, 2000; Wild et al., 2005; Soficaru et al., 2006, 2007; Trinkaus et al., 2009), refueled the debate regarding the makers and the chronology of the first Upper Paleolithic (UP) industries in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the remains of the two individuals found in Oase Cave appear to be water-transported surface finds, intrusive into a karst system lacking any archeological traces of Pleistocene human activity (Zilhão et al., 2007). The archeological contexts associated with the human remains in Cioclovina and Muierii caves are equally unclear. The significance of these finds has nevertheless become obvious after the gradual elimination of some other AMH representatives e Velika Pe cina, Hahnöfersand, Vogelherd, Konĕprusy (Smith et al., 1999; Terberger et al., 2001; Svoboda et al., 2002; Conard et al., 2004; Street et al., 2006) e from the regional Early Upper Paleo- lithic (EUP) timeframe. Furthermore, the reassessment of some key archaeological sequences, such as Bacho-Kiro (Tsanova and Bordes, 2003; Rigaud and Lucas, 2006), Istallöskö (Adams and Ringer, 2004), Willendorf II (Haesaerts and Teyssandier, 2003), Krems- Hundssteig (Teyssandier, 2007), Stranska-Skala (Svoboda and Bar- Yosef, 2003) gave way to new hypotheses regarding the emer- gence of the UP in Europe. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mircea_anghelinu@yahoo.com (M. Anghelinu), loredana_ nita2003@yahoo.com (L. Nit ¸  a), vsitlivy@uni-koeln.de (V. Sitlivy), thorsten. uthmeier@ufg.phil.uni-erlangen.de (T. Uthmeier), ion.baltean@heritageadvice.ro (I. B altean). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint 1040-6182/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2012.01.012 Quaternary International xxx (2012) 1e22 Please cite this article in press as: Anghelinu, M., et al., Looking around Peştera Cu Oase: The beginnings of Upper Paleolithic in Romania, Quaternary International (2012), doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2012.01.012